TWICE A HERO By Susan Krinard Twice a Hero Susan Krinard BANTAM BOOKS NEW YORK TORONTO LONDON SYDNEY AUCKLAND Also by Susan Krinard Prince of Shadows Prince of Wolves Prince of Dreams Star-Crossed TWICE A HERO A Bantam Book / June 1997 All rights reserved. Copyright © 1997 by Susan Krinard Cover art copyright © 1997 by Franco Accornera Book design by Laurie Jewell ISBN 0-553-56918-X PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA In memory of my beloved Granddad, Hubert Earl Smith and with special thanks to Ellie Johnson, Esther Reese, Casey Mickle, and Callie Goble for their help with the details. Part One From a wild weird clime that lieth, sublime, Out of Space—out of Time. —Edgar Allan Poe Chapter One What's past is prologue. —William Shakespeare San Francisco, 1997 "YOU COME FROM a long line of adventurers, MacKenzie Sinclair. Damn it, Brat, I'll haunt you from my grave if you break the family tradition." Homer Sinclair, his face flushed with passion, subsided back among the pillows. A vein in his forehead throbbed, and his left hand shook; MacKenzie leaned over the bed, stroking his flyaway white hair. "Come on, Homer. Melodrama doesn't suit you." "Don't you patronize me," he said, glaring at her. He could still manage a certain ferocity with that stare, even though his withered body had long ago lost its strength. "I'm dead serious, and I'm not going to see you grow old buried in books and moldy pottery, convincing yourself that's all there is to life." MacKenzie stilled her hand on his forehead. "How many times do we have to go through this?" "As many times as it takes to get it through that thick skull of yours," he snapped. His glasses slid down his nose; Mac set them carefully back in place, and he batted at her fingers. "I'm not going to have your martyrdom on my conscience—" "Martyrdom?" Mac unhooked her legs from the chair she'd been straddling and pushed to her feet. "That's a low blow, Homer, and you know it." "Maybe that's just what you need!" She hooked her thumbs in the waistband of her loose jeans. No sense in letting him make her angry now; after six years she knew how to handle the brilliant and temperamental man in the bed. "Funny you should mention martyrdom. Of course it doesn't make any difference thatyour academic career got derailed when you were stuck with your widowed daughter-in-law and her two kids—" "Should I have turned you all out in the street?" "—and that you raised me and Jason after Mom died, got us an education—" "An education that'll be wasted on you, Brat, unless you get your nose out of books and make yourself face the real world!" Mac clamped her lips together and didn't let Homer see that he'd scored a direct hit.I ought to have humored him , she thought. But they'd never been anything but honest with each other. "You want a philosophical discussion on what's real?" she asked wryly. She rested her foot on the chair and blew her bangs from her eyes. "Do you mind if we eat first? This could take all night." Homer gave a wheezing chuckle. "I should have known I couldn't rattle you, Brat." His chuckle became a cough; he waved off Mac's concern with an irritable flap of his hand. "All right. No more low blows. Come here and sit down." Something in his tone made her obey without question, as she'd done as a child before she'd lost her awe of him. The high color in his face had drained away, leaving his skin nearly translucent. Fragile, like delicate glass. And that close to shattering. "I don't have much time left," he said. The usual protest almost escaped her; a small dishonesty, but one she clung to with stubborn determination. "You know it, Brat," he said, almost gently. "Your bullheaded denial isn't going to alter the facts." His hand felt for hers; thin fingers tightened with surprising strength. Their hands were much alike, blunt-nailed and sturdy. Or so Homer's had been, once. "I'm ready to take off on the big adventure, if you'll forgive the tired cliché," he continued. "This old body wants to rest. But I need assurance from you that you're not going to let yourself wither away into an old intellectual prune, holed up with dusty books and artifacts in this house or in the museum because your mother and I robbed you of all the years you should have spent running wild and learning about life." Mac suppressed a sigh. Homer was like a terrier chasing a rat when he was fixed on his subject. "Running wild isn't what it used to be in your day, Homer. I don't think I was ever cut out for it." Her grandfather snorted eloquently. "You should have seen yourself when you were small, before your mother became ill. What a hellion you were. Into every scrape, up every tree. Lauren never let your hair grow because it was always full of twigs and gum and God knows what else." Mac ran her hand through her cropped hair. "Don't remind me." "You need reminding. You were as rough-and-tumble as any boy. More than Jason ever was. You had the neighborhood bully on the run when you were six, and he was two years older." He grinned. "Never made a lick of difference that you were the first girl to be born in our family for seven generations. You were a Sinclair in every way—" "Like Dad?" she said softly. He sobered, but his fingers kept their tenacious grip on hers. "Jake was so much like you." Homer's dark eyes—Sinclair eyes—grew hazy with memory. "He was wild, all right. But he had that stubborn streak of responsibility, same as you. A feeling that things were bigger than himself, that what he wanted didn't matter in the grand scheme of things. He was sure it was his duty to go to Vietnam." And die, Mac added silently,saving his platoon from ambush . That was where his adventuring had taken him. He'd never even seen his daughter. "Your mother wasn't right after Jake died," Homer muttered. "I was never a damned psychologist. Should have done more instead of spending so much time at Berkeley…" He was wandering. It happened sometimes—more and more often lately. Mac stroked the loose skin on the back of his hand. "And then this," Homer said. He pulled his hand away from hers and slapped his sunken chest. "You're stuck waiting hand and foot on me, chained to this mausoleum of a house, thinking you owe it to me." He closed his eyes. "Such a waste." Mac clasped her hands together between her knees and sucked in a deep breath. "Homer," she pleaded. "Stop this." He shook his head. She saw the moisture gathered at the corners of his eyes, spilling into the sunken hollows beneath. Tears. In all her life, Mac had seen him weep only once before. She swallowed and recaptured his hand. "You call it a waste? Without you Jason wouldn't have become the scientist he is. Look what he's already done in cancer research. And me—you gave me more than just reality, Homer. You gave me the world. You gave me a hundred worlds. Ancient Greece and Rome, the empires of China, the Renaissance, the Maya—" "The past," he countered hoarsely. "Can we ever really escape it?" "I don't know what you mean." "Sometimes I wonder if it really is a curse…" Once again his voice had changed, gone strange and distant with all the passion leached out of it. "Bad karma. Maybe that's the right word for it. The downside of wanting to conquer the world…" "Homer, what are you talking about?" His gaze sharpened. "Crazy old man, huh? Maybe I am. Or maybe things just get clearer." "You might try making it clearer to me." He chuckled without humor. "Did you ever wonder, Brat, why the Sinclairs, grand adventurers all, have had such blasted bad luck?" This was a new train of thought, and not one that Mac liked. "I still don't get you." "Oh, it doesn't go back very far, really. Only a few generations. But it's left its mark. My father lost in the Himalayas, me in this blasted bed wasting away, Jake and your mother. Maybe you're not so wrong to hide." He tried to sit up, shoving at the pillows with his back and elbows. "But damn it, Brat, maybe you're the one to end this thing." He was almost incoherent, and Mac struggled to hide her concern. "What 'thing,' Homer?" He didn't seem to hear. "Yes. A connection… I know I'm right." His expression hardened into resolve. "That box I had you get down yesterday. Put it up here. There's something I want you to see." With a dubious glance Mac complied, retrieving the bulging cardboard box from the floor beside the bed. The box had been shoved in the back of a closet no one had been into in years—like so much else of the ancient Victorian with its dusty artifacts and closed-up rooms. Mac had never found time for anything but cursory cleaning when she got home from the museum each day, and she and Homer certainly didn't have the money for outside help. God only knew what Homer had hidden away. A mausoleum, he'd called the house, but he didn't really believe it. He loved this place and everything in it. It was a museum, filled with the artifacts Homer and past Sinclairs had collected. Most of it should be in a real museum, and would be once Homer was gone… She cut off that line of thought and inelegantly wiped dusty hands on her old T-shirt. The box was no different from countless others—except for the simple, faded label on top. "Sinclair" was all it said. Homer grunted and folded back the dog-eared flaps. "Ah." He lifted out a wrapped, squarish bundle and set it carefully down beside him on the ...
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